Much trauma is caused by unfair uses of power in groups, particularly by moderators of online communities, who often act with unfair bias. This is a place to make such cases known to try to deter them from happening.

Autscape: candidates tied to have ethical positions on exclusion

The annual British spectrumite gathering Autscape is in progress, at Tonbridge, England, and today it held its AGM there. It included an election with 4 candidates, for 2 new directors to join its board of 9.

Annual General Meetings are always matters of public record. So there can be nothing confidential about this.

This Autscape’s entire theme is inclusion! In the election, a question from the floor, fitting that theme perfectly, asked the candidates for their ethical boundaries towards rejection + exclusion. By having to answer that – IT FORCED THEM TO HAVE ETHICAL BOUNDARIES TOWARDS REJECTION + EXCLUSION !!

So to act on fixing in place the boundaries extracted, by putting out notice of them.

The question did not force their answers to be perfectly what matches the values of this site: and certainly it is not welcome to the values of Autistic Groups Fairness Watch that the winners included Fergus Murray, a co-founder of the AMASE group recently in our attention. NB The latter statement will be deleted instantly if AMASE makes the response asked for in the page on itself, admitting that there was no hostility to it in the action described against promotions of Autistic Pride Day.

Murray was the only candidate not to agree that, as an ethical priority, personal rejection + exclusion are always wrong. The other 3 all did, thankfully including the other winner Jeremy McDonaugh, reelected. So Murray is restrained by that, and cartainly Autscape at present has a good inclusion ethic: “We are all equally entitled to be here”. But he is also restrained by his own answer.

He was only able to cite one instance in favour of rejectability: he said that rejecting one person may result in including many others.

This ties him to that limit. Still without agreeing with him, still holding that his sick rejection-apologism is dangerous and needs stopping, this is progress in that. It is far better that he is tied to this than to nothing. Even if giving this answer instead of a worse one helped him to win, the question was right because it rightly achieved prevention of the worst outcome, which was if he won without any restraining on this subject at all. It keeps many vulnerable folks safe.

In any case that arises where he wants to side with rejecting someone, he is obliged to evidence that that person’s actions specifically have inflicted, or are inflicting, rejection + exclusion upon others.